Time for Republicans to end marriage, not just their own.

Image by mharrsch via Flickr

When Lyndon Johnson found out that his Chief of Staff Walter Jenkins had been caught having sex with another man at the YMCA bathroom down the street from the White House, he knew his longtime friend and comrade had to go.  As Lee Edelman points out in an essay about the Jenkins affair, “Tearooms and Sympathy: An Epistemology of the Water Closet,” having gay sex meant certain death for a political career because having gay sex meant vulnerability and breached borders and that the Soviets would invade any minute.  This was all the more true since Jenkins was the receptive partner in the exchange and his lover was “foreign born.”

In midcentury America, it wasn’t sex outside of marriage that doomed a political career (look at Kennedy), it was sex outside heteronormativity.  In other words, a patriot was always straight.

Fast forward to the 21st century.  Governor Mark Sanford’s political meltdown, brought on by an affair, a failed marriage (with four sons no less), and his absolutely pathetic attempts to lie about where he was (why didn’t he just say “I’m going to Argentina to recharge?”), have brought down this once possible Republican Presidential contender.

Mysteries Remain After Governor Admits an Affair – NYTimes.com.

And this just a week after Senator Ensign, yes, Republican and a possible contender, also resigned from a party leadership position for an affair with a former aid.

Why does all this exuberant heterosexuality, the sort that JFK dabbled in, lead to political scandal in the same way a homosexual encounter in a bathroom was political suicide (okay, is political suicide).  When did the patriot become not just straight, but also so utterly disciplined into marriage that any excess heterosexuality is scandalous?

Perhaps it all began with Clinton?  That’s when the Lewinsky scandal occurred and many of the same Republicans who are being caught took a stand on the sanctity of marriage, but it was also, just a few months before the Lewinsky scandal, that the Defense of Marriage Act passed.

It was also sometime around then that we as a culture became obsessed with weddings.  Movies started being made, one after the other, in which weddings were the entire narrative thrust.  Even other sorts of films, action films, murder mysteries, began to include a “gratuitous wedding scene” the way that movies during LBJ’s day often included a “gratuitous sex scene” or even a “gratuitous car chase.”

According to Chrys Ingraham, author of White Weddings, weddings started costing more and everything that went along with them, dresses, honeymoons, engagements, also got bigger and more expensive and more overburdened with meaning since if it wasn’t perfect all was clearly doomed.

And of course the gay and lesbian marriage movement began back then, as a national movement, and pushed the “sanctity” of marriage even closer to the center of our national consciousness.

So now the patriot is not just straight, but also most importantly, conjugally disciplined. All of the patriot’s sexual impulses must be confined to the conjugal bed (even if the patriot is gay!).  If the patriot does not exhibit sexual discipline, then he is unworthy to lead.

There are well over 1000 rights and privileges granted just by the federal government because citizenship is increasingly based on marriage.  And, according to Ingraham, the number of federal rights has actually gone up since the passage of DOMA.   No wonder some gays and lesbians want marriage so much.

So now Sanford’s lack of marital discipline has ruined his career.  The fiscal discipline he showed, where he refused to take Obama’s stimulus money because he wanted to pay down South Carolina’s debt rather than use it for state programs, is of no use to him now.   The only kind of discipline that matters is conjugal- for citizenship or leadership.

Perhaps all the disgraced Republican polticians can start a third party, the “End Civil Marriage Party.”  By ending civil marriage and the civil rights attached to it,  American leadership could be based on things like policy and civil rights could be based on being residents of this country, rather than how much conjugal discipline we show?